Letters from the Cape [25]
One small thing more. The first few shillings that a coloured woman has to spend on her cottage go in - what do you think? - A grand toilet table of worked muslin over pink, all set out with little 'OBJETS' - such as they are: if there is nothing else, there is that here, as at Capetown, and all along to Simon's Bay. Now, what is the use or comfort of a DUCHESSE to a Hottentot family? I shall never see those toilets again without thinking of Hottentots - what a baroque association of ideas! I intend, in a day or two, to go over to 'Gnadenthal', the Moravian missionary station, founded in 1736 - the 'bluhende Gemeinde von Hottentoten'. How little did I think to see it, when we smiled at the phrase in old Mr. Steinkopf's sermon years ago in London! The MISSIONARIZED Hottentots are not, as it is said, thought well of - being even tipsier than the rest; but I may see a full-blood one, and even a true Bosjesman, which is worth a couple of hours' drive; and the place is said to be beautiful.
This climate is evidently a styptic of great power, I shall write a few lines to the LANCET about Caledon and its hot baths - 'Bad Caledon', as the Germans at Houw Hoek call it. The baths do not concern me, as they are chalybeate; but they seem very effectual in many cases. Yet English people never come here; they stay at Capetown, which must be a furnace now, or at Wynberg, which is damp and chill (comparatively); at most, they get to Stellenbosch. I mean visitors, not settlers; THEY are everywhere. I look the colour of a Hottentot. Now I MUST leave off.
Your most affectionate
L. D. G.
LETTER VII - GNADENTHAL
Caledon, Jan. 28th.
Well, I have been to Gnadenthal, and seen the 'blooming parish', and a lovely spot it is. A large village nestled in a deep valley, surrounded by high mountains on three sides, and a lower range in front. We started early on Saturday, and drove over a mighty queer road, and through a river. Oh, ye gods! what a shaking and pounding! We were rattled up like dice in a box. Nothing but a Cape cart, Cape horses, and a Hottentot driver, above all, could have accomplished it. Captain D- rode, and had the best of it. On the road we passed three or four farms, at all which horses were GALLOPING OUT the grain, or men were winnowing it by tossing it up with wooden shovels to let the wind blow away the chaff. We did the twenty-four miles up and down the mountain roads in two hours and a half, with our valiant little pair of horses; it is incredible how they go. We stopped at a nice cottage on the hillside belonging to a CI-DEVANT slave, one Christian Rietz, a WHITE man, with brown woolly hair, sharp features, grey eyes, and NOT woolly moustaches. He said he was a 'Scotch bastaard', and 'le bon sang parlait - tres-haut meme', for a more thriving, shrewd, sensible fellow I never saw. His FATHER and master had had to let him go when all slaves were emancipated, and he had come to Gnadenthal. He keeps a little inn in the village, and a shop and a fine garden. The cottage we lodged in was on the mountain side, and had been built for his son, who was dead; and his adopted daughter, a pretty coloured girl, exactly like a southern Frenchwoman, waited on us, assisted by about six or seven other women, who came chiefly to stare. Vrouw Rietz was as black as a coal, but SO pretty! - a dear, soft, sleek, old lady, with beautiful eyes, and the kind pleasant ways which belong to nice blacks; and, though old and fat, still graceful and lovely in face, hands, and arms. The cottage was thus:- One large hall; my bedroom on the right, S-'s on the left; the kitchen behind me; Miss Rietz behind S-; mud floors daintily washed over with fresh cow-dung; ceiling of big rafters, just as they had grown, on which rested bamboo canes close together ACROSS the rafters, and bound together between each, with transverse bamboo - a pretty BEEHIVEY effect; at top, mud again, and then a high thatched roof and a loft or zolder for forage, &c.; the walls of course mud, very thick and whitewashed. The bedrooms